QuoteProject
So long as there are earnest believers in the world, they will always wish to punish opinions, even if their judgment tells them it is unwise and their conscience that it is wrong.
Walter Bagehot
ShareWTF𝕏

Interpretation

What this quote means

Believers often desire to punish differing opinions, despite knowing it's unwise or wrong.

In this quote, Walter Bagehot reflects on the tendency of individuals who hold strong beliefs to seek punishment for views that contradict their own. Even when their rational judgment may caution against it, and their conscience may tell them it's unjust, the emotional drive to enforce conformity can overpower reason and morality.

Themes

BeliefPunishmentOpinionsWisdomConscience

In practice

Example use cases

In a discussion about the importance of open dialogue, one could quote Bagehot to illustrate the dangers of dogmatism.

More from Walter Bagehot

Progress would not have been the rarity it is if the early food had not been the late poison.
Walter BagehotRead
It is good to be without vices, but it is not good to be without temptations.
Walter BagehotRead
War both needs and generates certain virtues; not the highest, but what may be called the preliminary virtues, as valor, veracity, the spirit of obedience, the habit of discipline. Any of these, and of others like them, when possessed by a nation, and no matter how generated, will give them a military advantage, and make them more likely to stay in the race of nations.
Walter BagehotRead
Efficiency in an assembly requires a solid mass of steady votes; and these are collected by a deferential attachment to particular men, or by a belief in the principles that those men represent, and they are maintained by fear of those men - by the fear that if you vote against them, you may soon yourself have no vote at all.
Walter BagehotRead
Life is a compromise of what your ego wants to do, what experience tells you to do, and what your nerves let you do.
Walter BagehotRead
The most melancholy of human reflections, perhaps, is that, on the whole, it is a question whether the benevolence of mankind does most good or harm.
Walter BagehotRead

Similar quotes

Disbelief in futurity loosens in a great measure the ties of morality, and may be for that reason pernicious to the peace of civil society.
David HumeRead
How pathetically scanty my self-knowledge is compared with, say, my knowledge of my room. There is no such thing as observation of the inner world, as there is of the outer world.
Franz KafkaRead
Slave camps under the flag of freedom, massacres justified by philanthropy or the taste of the superhuman, cripple judgment. On the day when crime puts on the apparel of innocence, through a curious reversal peculiar to our age, it is innocence that is called on to justify itself. The purpose of this essay is to accept and study that strange challenge.
Albert CamusRead
Thought is pure energy. Every thought you have, have ever had, and ever will have is creative. The energy of your thought never dies. Ever. It leaves your being and heads out into the universe, extending forever. A thought is forever.
Neale Donald WalschRead
Of all the enemies of public liberty, war is perhaps the most to be dreaded, because it comprises and develops the germ of every other.
James MadisonRead
What kind of guilt comes from being true to yourself but not to others?. As we have seen, being true to yourself may at times intrinsically and necessarily be in conflict with being true to others.
Abraham MaslowRead

A little wisdom, now and then

Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.